Anna Genoese talks about GLBTQ publishing and genre fiction, and why it might be better from a publishing standpoint to write a genre-marketable book with queer characters than to market one’s book as “queer fiction.” For a counterpoint, focused on literary fiction, see Edmund White’s Village Voice article on the recent flowering of gay fiction (via Bookslut).

Also via Bookslut and regarding gay fiction: Neil Gaiman reviews Alan Moore’s forthcoming Lost Girls, a graphic novel which has upset the hospital which owns the rights to J. M. Barrie’s estate. To his credit, Alan Moore doesn’t seem to care. I think the book sounds stunning.

I’ve finished scanning my grandmother’s memoir and am correcting the text — I’m about a third of the way done with it. As I work I’ve been thinking about what I want to do with the manuscript: revise it? Rewrite it substantially? Fictionalize it? In this interview with Alice Munro (yet again, via Bookslut — can you tell I’m catching up on my blog-reading?), she talks about writing her most recent book, partially based on the history of her family:

Q: The View from Castle Rock draws upon material relating to both your paternal ancestors and your personal recollections. In your 1994 “Art of Fiction” interview with Paris Review, you spoke of how William Maxwell had written about his family in Ancestors, and you said: “He did the thing you have to do, which is to latch the family history onto something larger that was happening at the time—in his case, the whole religious revival of the early 1800s. . . . If you get something like that, then you’ve got the book.” Might you comment on this in regard to your new collection?

A: I think that that’s very helpful, because otherwise what you’ve got is family history, and that’s very interesting to you and other members of your family perhaps, but not generally. This book has a lot to do with a certain part of Scotland which had also undergone an interesting religious phenomenon, although not exactly a revival. The Protestant faith there had taken hold in a very austere form, and it had a total effect on people’s lives.

With my grandmother’s story, the two strongest thematic threads are the experience of the Depression, and her care for and obsession with animal welfare and environmentalism; the Depression history is more gripping, though based on the manuscript’s wacky final chapter, I suspect my grandmother would’ve chosen to emphasize her fears about the future of the environment. Still, I need to think more about how to evoke the breadth and meaning of which Munro speaks.

I read Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial a few days ago, and am just finishing Julia Child’s My Life in France — both of them have me thinking about how to manage large chunks of exposition. Child’s book has the looseness of dictated memoir; Gorodischer sets up an equally loose episodic structure, jumping centuries between chapters. My grandmother’s manuscript, in its current form, goes beyond loose and episodic to completely messy, and it’s her management of exposition, I think, that will require the most work. When she writes scenes she generally does them well.

And now I’m off to finish Julia Child’s book and daydream about cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu. More later.

Today, I am scanning. More specifically, I’m scanning the approximately three-hundred-page manuscript of my grandmother Louise’s memoir — or however much of that manuscript I can manage today before I go entirely nutty with boredom. This manuscript is the basis of my next writing project. I’d read a bit of it before and remembered it as being poorly written, so I’d only been hoping to get material for a novel from it — but, despite being a structural mess, it’s got chunks of snappy prose, sharp digs of wit, and a fascinating historical sweep. (The most obvious bit of historical interest: she lived with her family in a tent during the worst of the Depression.) My new plan is to edit her text and buttress it with some of my own writing, either fictional or non-, about Louise and my family. My father, especially, is excited about this plan — we spent an afternoon this week going through all the old photos Louise kept to accompany her manuscript (yes, I am very lucky, research-wise). I never knew Louise, since she died while my mother was pregnant with me, but I’m getting to know fragments of her now.

The best part, so far, has been the letter she included with the photos, instructing future family members on how the thing might be published; she admits to some roughness, but believes it might be edited into shape, and suggests that “perhaps the best way to handle it is through an agent. Libraries will always have ‘The Literary Market Place’ or something like it, giving names of agents and the whole procedure to follow, sending a m.s. 4th class special and all that.”

My publishing-savvy grandmother; I think we would’ve gotten along well.

In other news, the National Books Critics Circle blog has been interviewing authors who responded to the NY Times best 25 survey and asking them why they chose the works they did. So far, nobody’s explained a vote for Blood Meridian by admitting to a passionate love for conjunctions. “And” — it’s just so sexy!

Also, Sarah Monette is talking about Ursula Le Guin’s review of Hav, and discussing the similarities between Le Guin’s view of sf and her own concept of “hard fantasy.” These lines of Le Guin’s, which I’m stealing from Monette’s citation, interested me:

Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality. The “sciences” or areas of expertise involved are social - ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history. … Serious science fiction is a mode of realism, not of fantasy; and Hav is a splendid example of the uses of an alternate geography.

I’m picky about the disciplines I label “sciences”; that happens when you’re the child of geologist parents. I consider history not a science, even in the broader sense in which Le Guin uses the term, but a liberal art, and therefore I’m a little more likely to agree with Monette’s label for this sort of work, since I think of the thought experiments I do as fantastic rather than science fictional. But, to contradict myself, I still find sf terms helpful when talking about all sorts of fiction — I thought of my second novel as a kind of first contact book, except with Greek gods rather than aliens.

The sky across the valley
Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

My parents live in Ashland, Oregon, a beautiful little town tucked into the pine fur of the Rogue Valley. I forget, when I’m away from here, how stunning it is to be walking down the street in the middle of town and see mountains all around. My parents have lived here for three years and they still, while driving to the grocery store, burst into raptures over the beauty of the place. “I love Ashland,” my mother says. The last time she said it I laughed, because the most recent time I thought to myself “I love Austin” was after I biked back from Café Mundi feeling tired and blah and a one-armed homeless man told me I was looking fine. City living versus small-town living, I guess. In other particulars, though, Austin and Ashland aren’t so different; very hippieish and wacky and sweet. They both have lovely farmer’s markets, so you know I’m happy.

This is one view from our deck in early evening.

I just finished reading Mrs. Dalloway, the fourth Woolf book I’ve read in the last year. I liked it very much, though I didn’t adore it as much as I did To the Lighthouse or parts of Orlando (the other book was a collection of short stories).

I noticed when reading To the Lighthouse that I label her books, in my head, by technique — I think of TtL as the “how to write emotion” book, Orlando as the “how to write history” book. This is not to say that those techniques are the only thing I remember or like about the books, of course, or that they’re the only techniques Woolf employs or develops in each book; they’re the techniques that seemed most evident and interesting to me on my first read. For example, Woolf’s method of writing emotion in To the Lighthouse struck me because I’m often told by readers that my fiction is reserved, quiet, even distant in places — and I was amazed by how simply she approached the problem of communicating characters’ emotions, just stating, over and over, in a cascade: She felt X or He felt Y.

Mrs. Dalloway is the “how to write simultaneous thought and action” book — all through it, but particularly in that long lovely scene in which Peter Walsh moves about his hotel room preparing to go to the party and thinking about Clarissa. The technique is just as obvious as writing She felt X to express emotion, with parentheticals describing Peter’s actions as he thinks. But it works.

I wouldn’t usually describe a writer’s body of work as if it were a series of tutorials, but I do feel that way when reading Virginia Woolf; I learn some trick each time I read a piece of her fiction.

Which writers do you learn from that way?

This morning I went back to Cafe Mundi — probably my last visit for a while, since I won’t be living on the east side when I come back to Austin in August — and had a waffle and finished John Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel, the first book in his U.S.A. trilogy. It’s the first failed modernist novel I’ve ever read.

I’ve mostly read canonized modernist novels, by Joyce and Woolf and etc., which use fragmentation and stream-of-consciousness narration and image-laden prose to excellent effect. Dos Passos tries to employ those techniques, and occasionally manages a great phrase or a haunting juxtaposition of words, but on the whole it just doesn’t work. The 42nd Parallel has four main streams of narration — three fragmentary and lyrical and one more straightforward and chronological prose — and the straightforward prose sequences, which make up perhaps 2/3 of the book, are by far the most successful and gain little from the fragmentary bits of newsreel lyric, biography, and autobiography jammed in around them. The novel as a whole doesn’t fail, or doesn’t fail entirely; the narrative sections are gripping at times, and consistently interesting, and I’m intrigued enough to pick up the next two volumes of the trilogy when I have a chance. But I think it would’ve been a better book without the self-consciously experimental sections, where Dos Passos attempts to use a particular set of trendy techniques — and does fail, despite his talent as a writer.

I wish I had something to add to the current spate of debate about cultural appropriation — or, rather, I wish I had time to add something to the debate. This is the kind of issue that requires long periods of brow-furrowing thought before posting, however, and I’m using up all my brow-furrowing time this week on challenging packing issues like whether I should keep all my cd cases and where I’m possibly going to jam in that giant comforter. Regardless of whether you have time to contribute to the discussion or not, though, I recommend checking out the links listed here (and a more recent post here that isn’t included in that list) — and if you’re interested in academic explorations of the same issue, the list of theorists referenced in Oyceter’s entry.

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Via Maud Newton: excerpts from letters by Edmund Wilson, Elena Wilson and Mary McCarthy about Lolita in manuscript.

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New winner for dvd with best deleted scenes EVER: Everything Is Illuminated.

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I’m putting my worldly goods into storage this week and going to Oregon for the summer, so I’ll apologize in advance if this blog lies fallow until next Thursday or so. I’ll be back and posting soon.